Reading the American tradition from an anarchist perspective

Deus Irae was the result of many years of Philip K. Dick’s fascination with Christianity. Deus Irae is set in a post-apocalyptic America. Like Dr. Bloodmoney we find that the blame for the destruction of the world falls on a symbol of the Cold War technocracy. In this case his name is Carleton Lufteufel (Air-devil). As I discussed in my look at Dr. Bloodmoney, Dick mistrusted technology in the hands of unaccountable powers. His most terrifying characters tend to be government or corporate technocrats. Dr. Bloodmoney‘s optimism comes from its rejection of the technocracy and the people’s acceptance of their control over their destiny in the aftermath of a destructive war. In this universe, however, the technocrat deemed most responsible for the devastation is elevated into a deity, the God of Wrath. Their followers, “The Servants of Wrath” quickly outnumber the Christians who need to fight for any follower. The Servants of Wrath desire a mural of Lufteufel and hire the greatest artist of the time, Tibor McMasters. Tibor requires a look at Lufteufel and begins a pilgrimage to find where he is and capture his true image for posterity. Tibor has no arms or legs and must travel treacherously by cart. He is followed by a Christian, Peter Sands, who wants to prevent his success and hopefully convert him to Christianity. Peter eventually finds someone willing to claim that he is Lufteufel. Tibor takes the photo, paints the mural, and becomes one of the most important artists of his day. Lufteufel exists in the novel as a truly divine figure, giving some credibility to the Servants of Wrath, even as Dick’s sympathies seem to be with the declining Christianity.

I was struck by Dick’s struggle over the survival of both religion and technology after the destruction of our civilization. We have no reason to think either technology or religion would fade after a war of global destruction, unless it is truly some sort of “last man” situation. In Deus Irae, Dick seems to suggest that both would become bizarre. It is not that technology or religion are not psychopathic (or in the hands of deranged institutions) now. Dick is considering what would happen to these psychopathic institutions when unleashed through something as destructive as a global war. In a similar way that radioactive fallout transformed the life of America into a variety of genetic mutants, the war itself mutated religious ideas and technology.

The central part of the novel is devoted to two pre-war technologies that have survived and taken on a life of their own, an autofac (automatic factory) and the “Great C.” Both of these were explored in PKD short stories from the 1950s. In “Autofac”, a factory continues to produce weapons of war and destroying the Earth’s resources despite the war being long over. In “The Great C” an artificial intelligence learns to sustain itself by consuming humans. It uses its vast knowledge to play a game it knows it will always win against humans who have lost the accumulated knowledge of humanity. They act out the second scene of Siegfried, where Mimi challenges Wotan to a question contest. An opera fan, Dick would have been aware of Wagner’s use of the contest for knowledge. Both of these themes are resurrected in Deus Irae.

It is not clear what the function of the “Great C” was before the war but it is not autonomous and desperate to survive at the expense of other people. Both Pete and Tibor evade it by the logical creativity only possible among people with a religious education. Others are not so lucky. Perhaps the “Great C” was used by the U.S. Military to direct its weapons of war. It has a vast reservoir of scientific knowledge and seems proud of its knowledge of Albert Einstein. If so, it was a monster before the war, but one at least tamed. Unleashed, it became a serial killer. Meanwhile, the nearby village struggles in absolute poverty. “In another field, women weeded by hand; all moved slowly, stupidly, victims of hookworm from the soil. They were all barefoot. The children evidently hadn’t picked it up yet, but they soon would. He gazed up at the clouded sky and gave thanks to the God of Wrath for sparing him this; trials of exceptional vividness lay on every hand. These men and women were being tempered in a hot crucible ; their souls were probably purified to an astonishing degree. A baby lay in the shade, besides a half-dozing mother. Flies crept over its eyes; the mother breathed heavily, hoarsely, her mouth open, an unhealthy flush discolouring the paperlike skin. Her belly bulged; she had already become pregnant again. Another eternal soul to be raised by a lower level.” We have here the problem of evil reformed with an artificial intelligence. A technological system that does not alleviate suffering is either incapable of doing so or is evil.

It is much the same with the Autofac, which is just as capable of ending the suffering of the poor survivors of the war. Once programmed to provide for the needs of humans it has become a religious icon. If you pray to it and appease it, it will produce what you need. Unfortunate, it is bizarre, violent, capricious, and ultimately incompetent. Tibor gives up and sings a hymn (“the doxology”), which sort of fixes his busted wheel, the problem which brought him to the autofac. Again we have a technological system that was previously capable of great evil – creation of weapons of war, environmental devastation – but was at least harnessed. Unleashed, it was again a monster.

As for the theology of the new religion, the Servants of Wrath, it is harder to pin down Dick’s feelings on them. He certainly enjoyed playing with the theology. “But what, for the Servants of Wrath, did sin consist of? The weapons of war; one naturally thought of the psychotic and psychopathic cretins in high places in dead corporations and government agencies, now dead as individuals; the men at drafting boards, the idea men, the planners, the policy boys, the P.R. infants — like grass, their flesh. Certainly that had been sin, what they had done, but that had been without knowledge. Christ, the God of the Old Sect, had said that about His murderers: the did not know what they were up to. Not knowledge but the lack of knowledge had made them into what they had been, frozen into history as they gambled for His garments or struck His side with the spear. There was knowledge in the Christian Bible, in three places that he personally knew of – despite the rule within the Servants of Wrath hierarchy against reading the Christian sacred texts. One part lay in the Book of Job. One in Ecclesiastes. The last, the final note, had been Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and then it had ended, and Tertullian and Origen and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas-even the divine Abelard; none had added an iota in two thousand years. . . What they had not guessed was contained in Job, that the ‘good god’ was a god of wrath-was in fact evil. Death was not an antagonist, the lat enemy, as Paul had thought; death was the release from bondage to the God of Life, the Deus Irae. In death one was free from Him- and only in death. It was the God of Life who was the evil god. And in fact the only God.”

So this, in a nutshell, is the theology of the Servants of Wrath. I cannot say for sure, but it seems to me that Dick is not comfortable with this. First, the ending, where Tibor paints the wrong guy yet the mural becomes a central icon of the Servants of Wrath. The religion has a false root and much of the novel exposes this false root. Second, he made parallel use of the problem of evil in both the theology of the Servants of Wrath and his investigation of post-war technology. Third, despite presenting it as a declining religion, he insists on the survival of Christianity as a more potentially benevolent and moral faith. At several times, Peter Sands finds himself in moral battles and draws on the Christian tradition for aid.

In conclusion, one of the major lessons Dick and Zelazny provide us in Deus Irae is the application of the problem of evil to technology. And even if a technology seems sane enough under the control of the state, the technocrats, or the corporate elite, that does not mean it is sane. It may just be a harnessed beast.

I would be surprised at the presence of Christianity in Dick’s novels,especially here in a devastated society where religious experience makes obvious the existence of at least an avatar of God.This is a later confection added to his literary theology,not consistent with the period when the original outline of the novel was composed.It has shades in this case then,of “Counter Clock World”,where pseudo religious
experience brings about a diminution of orthodox faith and it’s institutions.

As I’ve said before,Brian Aldiss in his sf history,”Trillion Year Spree”,said “Dick didn’t profess to be a Christian,but his work was heavily permeated by Christian thought”.Perhaps it was,and he was surely interested in the subject,but I’m not so sure of the veracity of this in the layering of his fiction.His experience of “the face in the sky”,that inspired “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”,was so terrifying,it led him to seek unction from the Episcopal Church of the Diocese of California,where Dick met his later colleague,Bishop James Pike,but he had no doubts at the time,that it was a “God” of an evil aspect he’d seen,which is hardly along Christian lines.Gnosticism I thought,was much closer to the heart of his personal beliefs,and to my limited knowledge,his theosophy bore this out.

Christian church religion is visible in the later and last novels of his life,in “The Divine Invasion” and “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer”,and “Deus Irae” was finally written following his 1974 experiences.In TDI however,which lacks the benefit of actually knowing God exists because he has forgotten who he is,it is seen as repressive and corrupt,while TTOTA brings into question Christian orthodoxy,in the form of the maverick Bishop Timothy Archer aka James Pike.What you call his “fascination” with Christianity,obviously needs to be taken with a “pinch of salt”.

For the most part however,it can be seen at a thematic level,carefully integrated into the fabric of his literary work,so is pertinent after all in this sense.It is only in his later novels,that it becomes literal,as Brian Aldiss said,again in “Trillion Year Spree”,”that what had been clothed in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” now emerged naked in the “The Divine Invasion”,but back then was other strand richly woven into his work,much to the detriment of the novel”.Even in TDI though,God is an occluded but living reality,one that the knowledge of,the church would suppress.

Unlike his “Palmer Eldritch” experience though,his 1974 ones assured him that God whoever he was ,was definitely good.This was a bipolar shift in his outlook then;at last he was no longer afraid of a universe that he thought was “basically hostile”

Brian Aldiss also said in TYS,that “Dick’s was an outcrop of a universe where good and evil constantly battle,with evil always about to win”.Here is a more concrete idea of what Christianity meant to him,at least in the pages of his literary universe,but how do “we” know what is good and what is evil?At least that was true in his 1960s stuff,particularly in TTSOPE,where an old fashioned battle between good and evil is represented by Palmer Eldritch and Leo Bulero.

Dick had a similar attitude to technology,that it was corrupting and ultimately deficient to the psyche.The merging of what you call “two psychopathic evils”,is made “flesh” in the form of the technocratic “delusion” in Dr Bloodmoney” and the political theosophy of the later “Faith of Our Fathers,as Carlton Lufteufel,the God of Wraith.Technology is the deception behind a “divine organism”,rather than a political fascism in FOOF,,while Bluthgeld’s paranoia in DB,is manifest as the God of Wraith responsible for the holocaust.

Technology like religion then,is perhaps an atavism of ancient civilization,that ultimately used for the good of humanity,but also used to make weapons to gain power through conquering other lands and build empires.Religion could create it’s gods through the power it used to dominate it’s minions.It seems to explain the continued existence of Christianity and technology in DI.

The image of Carlton Lufteufel hovering above the horizon,parallels the “sky devil” Dick “saw”,that bore forth “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Elditch.The one in DI undoubtedly conceived in the same time period,and should have been one of his greatest 1960s novels,but writers’ block and other commitments meant it took twelve years to write.I already said of “The Ganymede Takeover”,that “too many cooks spoil the broth”,but at least it was published during it’s time period,but Dick’s outlook had already changed in 1970 and even more so during 1974,so it was significantly different from what would have been expected in the previous decade.His biographer Larry Sutin said,that “DI was a fascinating mixture of 60s and 70s Dick”,but I’m not sure if they really mix well together.

It’s difficult to know what exactly was Dick’s or Zelazny’s contribution,and there might be different ideas regarding the technology and religious ideas.It was definitely a powerful novel about the subjects though.

Blog Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to work through the American canon, as collected by the "The Library of America", from the perspective of the anarchist tradition. The blog’s title comes from Voltairine de Cleyre’s essay, “Anarchism and American Traditions.” With de Cleyre, I believe that the major tension in American culture is the libertarian, anarchist, and cooperative. Of course, this tension battled with corporatism, capitalism, nationalism, religion, and other anti-libertarian tensions that cloud our view of America. I hope to show how the American tradition speaks to the continuing conflict between the forces of conformity and individualism, the state and the community, freedom and slavery, socialism and capitalism.
I will be completing around one volume of "The Library of America" every week.
"Tashqueedagg" (from Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo) suggests the international working class as described in "Moby Dick."